ROBERT FRANK (1924–2019)

U. S. 90, En Route to Del Rio, Texas, is the last image in Robert Frank’s The Americans and features Frank’s wife, Mary, and their children, Pablo and Andrea, sleeping in the back of their car. Frank’s family rode with him for portions of the cross-country journey he embarked upon for this epochal project.

In a letter to his friend and mentor, Walker Evans, Frank writes on stationery from Del Rio, ‘We are now in Carlsbad, N.M. No more arrests since I travel en familie.’

Frank was referring to two incidents that occurred earlier that year (1955): the first was in Detroit over the summer, when Frank spent a night in jail for possessing two license plates (his current plate and the one from his car’s previous owner). The second was a dramatic twelve-hour arrest and interrogation in McGehee, Arkansas that November. No reason was ever given for Frank’s vehicle being initially pulled over; in a subsequent report the arresting officer is recorded as saying that Frank was ‘shabbily dressed, needed a shave and a haircut, also a bath. Subject talked with a foreign accent.’

It was later that same month that Mary and the children joined Frank in Houston and the four drove across southern Texas on U.S. 90. About this time in her life, Mary later remarked, ‘We just took off in a car. It was freezing in Texas, a lot of snow… two kids, one of them sick, no place to wash diapers. We didn’t know where we were going or where we’d stay’ (Hayden Herrera, Mary Frank, Harry A. Abrams, New York, 1990, p. 25). Given the austere nature of the trip, and the uncertainties of it all, as expressed only as a mother can, Frank’s positioning of this as the last image of his epic poem rings particularly tender.